While working for a few organisations, both public and private, since 1998, I have worked for a wide variety of managers, and have observed many more in action. In this experience, I have come to believe that there are essentially two types of managers--those who primarily focus on managing the tasks executed by their staff and those who primarily focus on managing the staff that executes those tasks. This is critically important to me in my current role since, as a project manager, I am regularly involved in both task and staff planning and the successful alignment of the two.

Up front, I propose that organisations require a mix of both types of manager, but positioned in the correct roles and in the proper ratio based on operational needs. To distinguish why I feel this way, it is important for me to provide my definitions and characteristics of both manager types.

Task Managers - Driving Event-Specific Solutions

At a high level, the focus of task managers are deliverables and timelines. As long as these are met, the people involved are interchangeable as long as they get the job done. A staff's interaction with this type of manager most often revolves around the status of deliverables, updates on timelines, and task issue resolution. As a result, a staff member's relationship with the task manager rides the volatility of each task at hand. If your tasks are going well, deliverables are executed and timelines met, you may almost never hear from a task manager until the next staff meeting or until you are on a task for which they share direct responsibility.

Task managers are great when an organisation, team or project is in crisis, or is perhaps facing an unusual challenge. They are excellent at focusing individuals on the items at hand and the goals for the immediate future.

Staff Managers - Building Team and Organisational Foundations

Whereas task managers are out to ensure a task or assignment is executed properly, staff managers are concerned with the context in which members of a team or organisation are executing those tasks and how those tasks fit into the bigger picture, both short-term and long-term for each individual and, by extension, the team and organisation as a whole. Thus, the interaction between staff manager and individual staff members is focused on such things as work environment quality, training, organisational- or team-building activities, short- and long-term goals and aspirations, salary and benefits, and general feedback on the relationships between management and staff.

Staff managers ensure that, throughout the volatility and ups and downs of day-to-day tasks, individual staff members have a strong foundation to fall back on within their team and / or organisation.

With these definitions in mind, it is easier to understand why employing the right mix of the two manager types is key to an organisation's success. Having too many of either type will lead to different sets of problems - too many task managers will result in lower employee morale, burn out and eventual turnover of quality staff; too many staff managers will result in lower operational execution, weaker financial performance, and eventual downsizing of quality staff.

A final thought - can a manager successfully combine both types in the execution of their duties? From my experience, managers should try to adopt aspects of both types into their roles and responsibilities, but with the 80/20 rule in mind. A task manager should be incorporating the perspective of the staff manager as approximately 20% of what they do. Likewise, the staff manager should try to similarly incorporate the task manager perspective. This will ensure both manager types are not regularly in opposition on the critical needs of a team or organisation. If you try to get both types out of the same manager, that manager will regularly fail to live up to the expectations that individual staff members should have of them when in either role. In the end, it is up to the presidents, CEOs, directors, etc. of the organisation to ensure this does not happen.

The most exciting thing about working for Manhattan Associates is the opportunity to positively impact the evolution of a client's business through supply chain improvement and innovation. As part of this experience, I am also in the position to have some impact internally on the evolution of the next generation of supply chain software by bridging R&D with the latest marketplace demands in Australia.

Coming up in a week is Manhattan's annual Momentum Conference, from May 2nd to May 5th. The theme is "Platform Thinking," which is nothing new from a general business management perspective. The use of platforms in the automotive vehicle production space dramatically changed the auto industry beginning in the late 20th Century, a practice defined as a "shared set of common design, engineering, and production efforts, as well as major components over a number of outwardly distinct models and even types of automobiles, often from different, but related marques."

So the question is: Why does this deserve attention now in the supply chain software space? When one examines all of the various touchpoints and activities in an end-to-end supply chain, the sheer scope and scale can be overwhelming. It is thus no surprise that many supply chain disciplines developed early on as responsibilities in smaller, manageable silos--manufacturing, procurement, transportation, warehousing, and POS fulfillment are the primary examples, and each can be further broken down into related activities. It is upon this market landscape that supply chain software has evolved as a wide range of offerings and solutions geared towards particular silos with some peripheral overlap. Manhattan Associates began this way with its WMS and has since developed a full suite of supply chain execution-oriented applications through acquisition, organic R&D efforts, and partnerships on a common platform.

I believe that "platform thinking" is about further removing the barriers in making significant gains in supply chain improvement and innovation. Where a variety of solutions have been available from a number of vendors for almost every primary supply chain activity in the past, the solutions and the decisions behind them have been disjointed from the standpoint of both business processes and the underlying system architecture. Many companies have had to make an amalgam of solutions work as their approach to managing human, financial and physical architecture in the supply chain evolved in advance of technology.

A perfect example of this evolution is a large company that internalises its supply chain functions and people into one business group (human / organisational), takes the next step to establish this group as a profit center which sells its supply chain services to the rest of the company's units (financial), and then begins to organize its assets around this framework (physical). This group will likely come together initially with disparate tools and systems around such services as transportation management, warehouse management, and ocean freight management. The ability to provide such a group with a suite of proven supply chain execution solutions on one platform clearly becomes an advantage in terms of overall deployment speed, quality and cost, as well as in post-implementation support and future upgrades. Integration with a single ERP system that spans the entire company's business units would also work from the same platform. End users, including internal customers, external customers and supply chain partners become linked together via a single networked interface. As a result, the platform solution becomes an enabler towards further strengthening relational (collaboration) and innovational (new ideas) supply chain architecture.

Momentum as an "Intersection"

I recently finished reading "The Medici Effect," an excellent book that explains how to create opportunities at the "intersection of ideas, concepts and cultures." For all those who attend Momentum 2010, it will indeed be an intersection worth taking advantage of towards taking your supply chains to the next level. Manhatta provides its own top 10 reasons for attending, but the truth is that an event that blends fellow Manhattan customers from around the world, product experts, technology partners and industry analysts all in one location is ripe for generating new insights and ideas into general supply chain practices as well as each attendee's own personal supply chain challenges.

Thinking Beyond Momentum

One of the things that blogs do for readers, and which Twitter does even better, is point us towards intersections. The list of individuals I have had the honor of sharing ideas with over the past few years via this blog has been fantastic and far more rewarding than I imagined at the start of my writing. With the advent of Twitter, the speed with which intersections are presented as increased tremendously. Recently, I came across another blogger who is an entrepreneur and, in my view, an intersection specialist--Valdis Krebs of The Network Thinker. Mr. Krebs has worked with IBM, with which Manhattan Associates is a key partner in deploying its Supply Chain Intelligence solution.

Once a company has deployed platform thinking from an informational architecture perspective, Mr. Krebs' work in network analysis seems perfect for the next leap in relational architecture, leading to as Mr. Krebs describes on his blog:

"...a focus on patterns of connectivity and self-organizing behavior in economic and social networks and how these new structures lead to resilience, adaptability, agility, transparency, and innovation."

These are all attributes that any supply chain professional aspires to internalise within their organisation, but this can only be done if we see the important linkages between our field and at first unrelated fields such as social network analysis in addition to driving existing skill sets and capabilities forward.

Imagine now if we take this network analysis approach devised by Mr. Krebs and apply it to not only our internal supply chain organisations and networks, but to industry wide supply chain networks in seeking a mutually beneficial reduction in total costs. In the article"Keeping Trucks Full, Coming and Going," New York Times writer Ken Belson examines one group executing upon such a goal:

"Some of the country’s largest retailers, manufacturers and trucking companies are working on a solution, sharing information about their trucking routes in hopes of matching empty trucks with goods that need to be shipped.

"Known as Empty Miles, the program is the brainchild of the Voluntary Interindustry Commerce Solutions Association, or VICS, a nonprofit group that tries to make the supply chain in consumer goods industries more efficient.

"For decades, companies have tried to eliminate empty truck miles in an ad hoc fashion. One company would hear about another company that shipped along the same route. One manager would call his counterpart and work out a deal. Then, about two years ago, VICS members representing a swath of corporate America bore down on the problem. Diesel fuel was near record highs; the economy was slowing. Running empty trucks was more and more the difference between profits and losses; running fewer trucks was a way to reduce emissions and help meet corporate sustainability goals.

""The economy is demanding that these trucks run with things in them," said Joe Andraski, the president and chief executive of VICS, which is based in Lawrenceville, N.J."

As Mr. Krebs network analysis tools would show, a critical mass of participants in such a program would drive the overall benefits. His tools could also provide critical information to participants where the service is providing the most benefit, towards which industry counterparts are shared routes most beneficial, as well as a number of other patterns important to supply chain decision-making. Please take a look at his post on "overlapping networks."

All-in-all, there is much to look forward to in the supply chain space that makes working in this industry, and across borders, an exceptional experience. I look forward to sharing more of this experience into the future both on the blog and via Twitter. Cheers!

As one of the Australia project managers involved in the deployment Manhattan Associates supply chain solutions, I have been in the trenches with a key 3PL client as they evolve through a strategic transformation in the way they manage the supply chains of their customers. Beginning with MA's transport planning and execution solution, the goal is to make advances in digitizing internal, operational processes within a single solution, integrate with key customers through a single interface layer, leverage powerful reporting and analysis tools to enhance regular and periodic decision-making and present a scalable, holistic logistics solution to the marketplace.

Part of this effort involves the formation and deployment of a mobility solution that acts as part of the client's nerve center from which a portion of the information that drives supply chain intelligence is increased, aggregated and transformed for reporting and analysis.

In an extremely fragmented transport industry, it is only natural that many mobile solutions will find a niche with various players, large and small. A company focused on small and frequent parcel delivery in dense urban environments will approach a mobility solution in different ways than a company dedicated to infrequent, long-distance, large volume deliveries. As with any software, it is important to approach the selection of a mobility solution with an idea of the scale, scope, and overall complexity of the transportation network in question. Once the solution is deployed, what and how much information do you want to flow into the business? What services are actually required by customers versus what simply sounds sexy?

Due to the speed with which the mobile device market is innovating and introducing new products and technologies, it is important to choose a vendor that not only understands and fits your strategic vision but that also has a strategic vision of its own for the market. Providers of transport planning and execution solutions will need to know as much about how various mobility solutions integrate with their products and the mobility solutions vendors likewise.

Once in place, the mobility solution should provide, for example, the following positives, amongst others, when integrated with a transport planning and execution solution:

Enhanced supply chain visibility internally and for customers

Increased granularity of supply chain information and intelligence

Improved customer service levels

Advancements in employee productivity

More flexibility and rapidity in executing supply chain decisions

One example of a supply chain mobility solutions provider in the Australia-New Zealand market that is experiencing success is Blackbay, capable of deploying mobility solutions for a wide range of needs, but already proven with clients operating at high transaction volumes, such as Australia Post and New Zealand Post.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has joined the ranks of retailers that impose penalties on suppliers that fail to deliver products within the company’s prescribed four-day window. Under the new policy that goes into effect Feb. 1, suppliers whose products arrive at regional distribution centers before or after that period face a 3% penalty based on the cost of the goods.

Previously, the company requested delivery within a four-day window but gave suppliers no incentive to meet the schedule, said Dan Fogleman, a Wal-Mart spokesman. "This is a common practice among national retailers and really in line with charges assessed by our closest competitors," he said.

Suppliers now receive a must-arrive-by date when orders are placed and will be in compliance with the retailer’s new policy if the goods arrive on that day or the three previous days. A first-time miss will not trigger the penalty, but subsequent misses will, Fogleman said.

If products arrive at distribution centers earlier than expected, that drives up storage costs, he said. And if they arrive late, the products are not available for customers. In short, on-time delivery means lower prices for customers, he said. "One of the fundamental advantages we’ve maintained throughout our history is the efficiency in our supply chain."

Properly integrating a mobility solution with transport planning and execution will allow in-house and external logistics providers, such as those servicing Wal-Mart's suppliers, to closely track time window performance and to more quickly react in real-time to exception events in the field. Over time, these exceptions can be gradually reduced and possibly eliminated once trends and patterns are detected via supply chain intelligence tools.

The increasing overlap and cross-functionality of these transport network tools means that solutions providers must be on the ball in terms of vendor partnerships and research so as to deploy a truly integrated, if not wholly-owned, transport management solution for their clients.

An article in the Wall Street Journal back from early December have prompted me to write about India employees within multinational companies, and discuss how the skills and experience of these employees are developed so that they are successful when working across borders.

Within Manhattan Associates, my current employer, a key effort is made to develop the skills of India employees so that they can successfully support our projects from their India office as well as from on-site with clients. On every project I have worked on, an employee from our India office has rotated through as a technical or support consultant on-site. There are a few reasons why we see this as important:

Client-facing Opportunities: Although an India employee may be successful supporting a project remotely and resolving multiple technical issues, working on-site allows the employee to get a hands-on sense of the client environment, the range of functional requirements involved, and also provides the client with an opportunity to become comfortable with the remote team.

Direct Interaction with Functional Team / Project Managers: The rotation provides an opportunity for the India employee to deepen their relationships with on-site team members, who may primarily focus on more operational issues. Once the India employee returns to their home office, phone calls and online interaction increases in quality and effectiveness.

Personal Satisfaction: The India employee develops a great sense of self-worth and value in relation to the company and client.

From personal experience, a great deal of value is also generated when on-site consultants rotate through the India office, including members from the client's team when possible. If both rotations can be done on the same project, the overall implementation for the client will improve considerably.

"WSJ: How have you viewed the management profile of multinational companies in India changing in the past five years and how do you expect it to change in the future, especially with regard to the mix of expatriate versus local executives?

"Mr. Venkatesan: My sense is that during the past few years expats were in great demand. This was driven by the entry into India of a large number of global MNCs [multinational corporations] and also by the emergence of rapidly globalizing Indian MNCs like Infosys, Tata, Reliance or Jet Airways that needed specialized skills. A significant number of the "expats" have been people of Indian origin returning to India. All this is beginning to change. Global companies are localizing their management, recognizing both that this is a key to success in the market and that India can be a good source of talent. Cost pressures have also caused companies, both Indian and foreign, to take a close look at which skills are truly indispensable.

"Over the coming years I see a few trends. I see global companies paying much more attention to talent. The best companies will rotate their highest potential talent through places like India and China and Brazil as part of their development. We will also "export" more talent from India to other parts of the world as part of the same global talent development process. Finally, I also see a greater emphasis to growing local talent from within versus hiring a greater proportion of senior/middle management from outside. The mix of expats versus local executives may or may not change, but the underlying intent and strategy will certainly shift from a short-term fix to skill shortages to a more proactive global talent development agenda."

As part of this dynamic, a company needs to encourage a culture of learning where employees are able to share knowledge and formalize experience into a number of best practices for use across borders in multiple offices. Without this, a company may rotate employees, but there will likely be a higher chance of negative experiences occuring. For example, an India employee may be brought in, put to work and then sent home without much of a welcome and effort to engage them inside AND outside of work. As Mr. Venkatesan infers, it is an important time to invest in your India talent and put in place the programs that will make your business stronger as the global economy gradually recovers.

The surest way to ensure a drop in effort from a vendor is to a) issue petty complaints at every challenge and b) fail to recognize achievements, no matter how small or expected. I have seen these mistakes time and again during my +10 years of working on various types of projects and its a shame.

In my 2.5 years with Manhattan Associates, I have had varying involvement with the hardware upon which our software is installed and implemented. So far, I believe that the major issues around hardware fall into the categories of procurement, performance and maintenance. Since procurement essentially precedes performance and maintenance, it is only common sense that the poor procurement of hardware can result in downstream performance and maintenance issues.

Hardware does not necessarily always equate with servers and data centers when implementing supply chain execution software. With warehouse management systems, for example, it is common to also have some form of picking technology, such as RF guns, voice-picking devices, pick-to-light devices, etc. as well as a variety of material handling equipment.

Hardware Procurement

On the projects I have managed or worked on so far, below are the common problems I have seen around hardware procurement:

Indecisiveness around the overall hardware strategy--do you want to go with an in-house data center or proceed with a hosting solution (outsourced)?

Indecisiveness around the type of platform to procure (i.e. OS upon which your application and database will run)

Insufficient research and analysis around the true costs of a particular hardware decision in relation to the requirements to support a particular application, or set of applications

Lack of knowledge about the operations the hardware is intended to support

Insufficient planning around the future hardware requirements and the scalability of the short-term hardware sizing (i.e. memory and disk space capacity, chip set constraints, etc.)

Lack of proper hardware expertise being available to participate in the procurement process

Poor internal processes for executing hardware decisions

Lack of planning considerations around the need to procure hardware and services from overseas sources

All of the above can have a detrimental affect on:

project timelines,

project costs,

execution quality of an implementation,

vendor relationships, and

the quality of downstream hardware activities.

Hardware Performance

Usually performance problems occur when the size, volume and volatility of operations is not properly researched and analyzed prior to hardware procurement. Due to the lead times involved in adding hardware capacity, the failure to size properly for operations can lead to devastating consequences after a operation has transitioned onto new applications, goes "live" and quickly ramps up to normal business transaction levels.

Hardware Maintenance

Without sufficient expertise internally to properly maintain hardware, such as needed for monitoring capacity utilization, applying patches and updates, configuring scheduled jobs and processes, fixing and troubleshooting devices, etc., some companies are forced to deal with costly mistakes and unforeseen downtime or rely on subcontractors without proper knowledge of, or commitment to, the business.

My opinion is that hardware doesn't have to be hard, but as my boss remarked once: "If it was easy, it would be called easyware." From working with a variety of companies and hardware scenarios on multiple projects, I can understand how companies end up underestimating either the complexity of the hardware architecture required or the complexity of the operations that must be supported, or both. As a result, I believe companies should educate their employees about the role of hardware, especially how those executing business operations can lend their expertise in determining hardware requirements. Never assume that a particular IT organization, group or individual has everything under control.

I am in the process of finalizing an April trip to Bangalore. One or more of my Australia colleagues and I will engage in testing with our India colleagues in support of the TMS implementation I currently manage. Although I have spent a good amount of time with the India team on the WMS side, it will be my first time with the TMS India team and I am looking forward to the opportunity. Nothing beats being on-site with the technical team as they go through the development and issues related to an IT deployment half the world away.

My wife and I also have a friend in town and so blogging is much lighter than I anticipated with so much going on. The list of articles I have wanted to comment on is growing fast...

My brain needs a recharge this weekend before I can jump back into the ongoing topics I am covering around globalization and the impact the U.S. stimulus will have on supply chains. I am in the middle of getting my head wrapped around implementing a Transportation Management System (TMS) versus a Warehouse Management System (WMS). Because we use a common implementation methodology at Manhattan, most of the key tasks and milestones remain the same. The differences become clearer in the following respects:

WMS implementations focus on the nodes (warehouses and distribution centers) of a supply chain

The organization and culture built around a these two distinct products tend to be different

TMS is more network oriented and outside the four walls of a warehouse or DC, driving very different rollout considerations

Although I worked relatively briefly for a 3PL transportation provider in Japan, managing this implementation is really starting to ingrain in me the key pain points for a transportation provider and how systems should be built to manage those, if not completely eliminate them.

What is particularly exciting is foreseeing the point where I can begin to more fully understand the integration points between a WMS and TMS in providing a more total solution for a customer's supply chain. I already have a conceptual feel for what is required in this integration, but to actually develop the ability to successfully and competently create and execute an implementation that seamlessly integrates the modal and nodal aspects of a supply chain is someting I look forward to achieving.

Several months ago (has it been that long?!) I kicked off a series of posts on the development of a global IT deployment template, or framework, highlighting the need for the following components as the foundation:

An innovation and relations 'hub' grounded in a community of practice subscribing to the OODA Loop philosophy

A configurable set of agreed-upon modules that plug into the innovation hub

From my experience, the modules should not be so detailed as to become unwieldly, so I suggested previously they include Financial, Software, Hardware, Infrastructure and Human Resources management. Activities that occur in each of these areas during a global IT deployment would interact with the innovation and relations hub to provide feedback on lessons learned from ground operations and later apply new rules or best practices spearheaded by the team's or firm's innovation leaders.

This framework really begins to benefit a global IT deployment once it goes 'online' across the world at each site scheduled for implementation. Regardless of which order a particular site is expected to execute the implementation of a particular technology, bringing all sites online from the start will ensure the following:

Preemption of critical issues

Gradual reduction or complete elimination of repeat issues from site to site

Gradual increase in team efficiency, productivity, innovation and overall learning and performance

The above obviously leads to increased customer satisfaction as lead times decrease along with costs. This develops into strong references and an increased potential for future return business on other technology investments and deployments.

When multiple sites come online, usually headquarters, or the office where the deployment deal was initiated, becomes the 'lead hub' as show below:

Imagining this from a user perspective, each person in their respective areas of responsibility (the modules) would have access to an interface where they could reference and utilize such resources/tools as:

deployment guidelines as currently established

critical issues previously dealt with or under consideration

risks and opportunities to be aware of

outside news and internal commentary feeds related to this specialty

deployment team profiles and video introductions

secure web conferencing via voice/chat

deployment-specific document libraries

language-translation capabilities

In addition, everyone would have access to an innovation/relations interface to see the most up-to-date changes, best practices and rules being put into place to make the deployment a success. Project managers, regional and local, would manage the overall access to this interface but the idea is that all participants on the deployment would have real-time access to a deployments developments as it moves from site to site. This can only serve to eliminate the inevitable 'reinventing the wheel' or 'repeat instruction' scenarios that cost valuable time for project managers and resources alike when sites are brought into the picture only slightly ahead of ground implementation.

Geographically, a deployment of linked sites might appear as below:

As I have hinted above, a user-friendly technology solution is required to make this framework effective. Although there are online solutions already in the market focused on building collaboration amongst project teams, the key is how leadership deploys this technology, the philosophy behind its utilization, and the way in which multiple sites share in the deployment process from beginning to end.

As many experienced managers know, the greatest technology in the world will fail under poor leadership, poor strategy and/or poor methodology.

I have been sitting on this post for some time as I have been on-site at my client's distribution center, busy with several tasks during the day and working the evenings to synch up with the global team or prepare for the following day. Because this post and the next few are the most important in this series, I wanted to make sure I had some time to sit down and carefully lay out the content I have prepared. Admittedly, I am more deliberate with regards to developing my thoughts and don't mind a delay if I can promise a high quality post.

In previous posts, I have discussed the obvious need for a global IT roll-out template and the ideal approach to take in designing and utilizing the template. In addition, I referred to the example of Development-in-a-Box (DiB) as reflecting the approach and principles I have described as the most appropriate for launching a template across a variety of borders and cultures (let's think in terms of office-specific cultures as well as country-specific cultures). However, an approach and set of principles next needs a framework or an organizing structure that lends itself to a rapid launch on a global scale.

It is common these days in many businesses to think in terms of "modules" in regards to products and processes. Usually, several modules run on the same platform or logic so that users can simply "plug-and-play" as a module is required. For example, a manufacturing company might pull entire modules from several suppliers to plug into the final product. One of my previous employers, Denso, produced an entirely built HVAC module that could be snapped and screwed into vehicles at customers like Toyota and GM. Boeing has been utilizing this approach to build the new 787 Dreamliner, albeit with supply chain design issues. My own company, Manhattan, takes this approach with SCOPE. As long as the underlying platform--framework--is solid, several modules can be developed in parallel while ensuring they can be successfully and efficiently plugged into the end solution--whether it is an automobile, airplane or software package.

My opinion is that the framework for a global IT roll-out template should take on this modular structure but will be rooted in an underlying foundation built on the principles and approach outlined in earlier posts. Simply illustrated, I have created the below diagram to generically outline the framework:

In this diagram, the center pentagon is the foundation upon which the modules will plug into. These modules will be driven by a "community of practice" with similar principles and an adherence to the OODA loop concept. This is the most generic form of the template.

These modules are pieces of the framework that those from any country can relate to and thus allow this framework to bridge easily across borders and cultures towards synchronizing multiple, decentralized implementation teams.

In my next few posts, I will go through each module and further explain their relevance to the global deployment of supply chain technology. I will also discuss the in-module categories where rule-sets could be established in order guide such a deployment, which is typically a longer, strategic initiative. The extended duration of such initiatives naturally means that maintenance of the global design will be strained, and the global team likewise strained. The global IT roll-out template I am putting forth is not only an essential tool in maintaining the core intentions of the global design, but also a tool able to cultivate an environment of innovation, while easing the strain on the global-level project team.